They say, the bigger the variety, the harder the choice. This is definitely true, but who said it is easy to pick when variants are just two? For instance, you’re torn between two platforms and can’t make up your mind as to which one should be the engine of your prospective website, giving preference from Drupal to WordPress migration and vice versa. You’re bound to make the right decision in the end, and it is for you that we’ve worked hard to help out.
In this post, we’ve put together the statistical data about Drupal and WordPress to exclude any bias and let you make your selection based on purely objective information. So, why don’t we go ahead?
Usage
You’re not the only one picking a CMS platform now, so we searched Google trends to see how the interest to Drupal and WordPress changed over the last 5 years worldwide. The result is right below.
Obviously, WordPress ignites a lot more interest than Drupal, but don’t rush with decisions yet.
Next, let’s see what is the market share of the two CMSs in question. According to builtwith.com, WordPress powers 38% of the top 10,000 websites and 51% of all the sites across the Internet. Drupal, in its turn, is the platform on which 8% and 2% of websites are built correspondingly. The distinction is huge, but the fact that it is smaller among top 10k sites gives a nice benefit to Drupal.
Traffic
According to w3techs.com, Drupal is used for a smaller number of high traffic websites while WordPress boasts being used more widely, but for sites with low and medium traffic.
Users
You’re about to join one of huge communities of users, so time to get to know them better. On Drupal official page, they claim at least 1,176,000 websites to be using Drupal core, which means the number of users is still bigger.
As to WordPress, the total number of its downloads is approaching 19,000,000, while the number of websites it powers go over 17,289,521.
Both WordPress and Drupal boast celebrity clients. To name a few, Drupal is used by The White House, The Economist, Timex, BBC store etc. WordPress doesn’t lag behind, being the platform of choice for Fortune.com, New York Observer, TED, USA Today, CNN, TIME.com, National Post, Spotify, TechCrunch.
Number of plugins
When you are looking for a platform for your website, it is important to keep in mind that it’ll grow, your needs will grow, your plans may change, so the platform should be able to keep up and support you in this. Basic functionality is essential, but what else you can make your CMS do is of no less importance. This is why many users-to-be pay attention at the number of ready plugins available to provide additional functionality in a few clicks.
There are over 34,000 modules available for Drupal, and WordPress tops this number with 45,000+ active plugins in its directory.
Setup and maintenance costs
Although both WordPress and Drupal are totally free to download and use, they still require financial investments to get the site up and running. However, the “entry costs” for the two platforms differ greatly.
You must be already guessing it – WordPress wouldn’t be so incredibly popular if it were expensive. Surely, the price depends per each particular website and the requirements. However, overall, an average price for website setup and customization is around $250 for WordPress and $5,000 for Drupal, according to Сomentum.com. Further maintenance costs are $250 on average for sites using WP and start from $1,000 for Drupal websites.
Migration
According to aisite own statistics, moving Drupal to WordPress is second most popular migration direction, superseded only by switching from HTML websites to WP. We’ve performed 3 times more Drupal to WordPress migrations this year, if to compare with aisite launch in 2013.
Bonus stats
When doing a research for this article, we’ve discovered that there are a lot of posts on WordPress statistics, with a lot of interesting, useful, and sometimes weird facts. However, we haven’t come across any such post about Drupal. Just another interesting fact 🙂
Bottom line
Hopefully, this post has become the final drop directing you to the right decision as to which CMS to go with for your website. But even if you decide to change your platform later on, or already got a website and are now entertaining the idea of Drupal to WordPress migration or vice versa, don’t be apprehensive of the whole business. aisite will take care of the move totally automatedly. You can check it out in action at no expense, simply set up a demo migration.
